"I have withdrawn from partisan politics. I am a constitutionalist who
believes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be central
and the parties must be peripheral. What’s most important for me is what
you just mentioned haphazardly, we are over 30. Civics has not been
taught in the American public school system since 1970. And that means
everyone in Congress never studied the constitution and the bill of
rights as you and I might have.
And that is a critical flaw because it’s why we were admired and
respected for so long, it gives us our national identity, it tells the
world who we are and why we are who we are, and without a frame that
gives us values that stand behind the bill of rights, we’re just
floating in the air and our sectors of society are not connected.
What’s really important is that the assumptions of the left and the
right are all skewed wrong. We have t find areas of agreement and areas
that we share. And we do share the notion that education accomplishes
certain things. One, it turns students into citizens. And, two, it
teaches students how to run the country before it’s their turn to run
the country. And, three, it teaches the values of this nation.
People come from all over the world or are born into this nation
without the values that we have here. That’s why they came here, to get
them. And what are they? You can put them in opportunity, rise by merit,
mobility, and freedom. That’s what we sell. And if you don’t want that,
you’ve chosen the wrong place. And you don’t get a pass by being born
here, you have to learn it. Even the Ten Commandments are not known at
birth. You must learn them. And we must learn our values and if we
don’t, we are fatally, fatally wounding ourselves. We will not have any
way to really combat the ideas behind ISIS because we won’t know our
own. And we have to."
-Richard Dreyfuss
